


still life

by seek_its_opposite



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 02:41:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16076666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seek_its_opposite/pseuds/seek_its_opposite
Summary: Maybe she envies his ability to experience love as a byproduct, as a detail, and be satisfied with it, but that isn’t her.





	still life

What haunts her now, right now anyway, is not the fingers coiled around her heart but the dead girl in the truck. It’s the chipped white wooden slats on the side of the truck like ribs, like her own ribs peeling back from her body. It’s the girl buried not in the dirt but in the unholy trappings of mourning: rotting petals eaten through by beetles and cards bearing regrets scrawled in ink that ran in Tuesday night’s rain. She might have found it poetic from a great distance, from another life, but now she only finds it improper. Regrets can’t hold a body. Closure starts dirty and six feet deep; it has to.

“Scully?”

His knock rattles the bathroom door.

She sticks her head out of the curtain, calls, “I’m okay, Mulder,” and returns to watching the soap run down her chest.

Once, as a kid, she ran into a gate on the edge of the base—just looked back at Missy and plowed into it on brand-new roller skates. She remembers thinking her white skates looked like clouds against the sky. “You just got the wind knocked out of you,” Melissa said, picking gravel out of her elbow as she coughed, streaking dirt across her cheek when she wiped her tears. _You just got the wind knocked out of you. No harm done_. Mulder had almost smiled as she gasped back to life.

What had she looked like to him, flat on her back? Would he have fashioned her a grave out of flowers?

She steps out of the shower, buries her face in a towel, and screams into it, just for a second, before shutting off the water.

Even shrouded in steam her chest aches. It feels like after a bad coughing fit, like she’s back in the hospital with blood on her lip and an iron tang in the back of her throat. She wipes a circle in the fogged mirror and stands naked and wet before the glass, studying the place where a hand cracked open her sternum. She shivers. An ugly bruise is already forming, but beyond that the skin is clean, unbroken. The faded UMD crewneck Mulder left folded on the counter is the same one she stashed here months ago, during her recovery from the last time she almost watched herself bleed out. She wonders when her body will run out of miracles.

When she finally leaves the bathroom, she finds Mulder balanced so delicately on the edge of the couch he might as well not be sitting at all. He stretches his leg to stand but pulls it back, like he’s afraid to get too close, and she thinks, _Really, Mulder. Don’t you get it yet?_

“We should get you home,” he says, voice soft.

“Oh.” _Oh_ , followed by a flash of _I forgot I wasn’t_ — As if there haven’t been times over the past year when she’s wondered if she might walk out of this apartment and never come back. “I’d rather stay here,” she says.

And he says, “Okay.”

He doesn’t move. This is the part where he studies her, waits for her to add the rest of the formula to the chalkboard, only she doesn’t know what chemicals they’re mixing. She almost takes it all back. _On second thought my own bed sounds nice. Don’t worry about me, Mulder, I’ll call a cab, see you Monday._

Instead she shrugs, curling the sleeves of her sweatshirt into her palms. “I’m sore enough without having to strap a seatbelt over myself tonight.”

She thinks she means it. Still, when Mulder asks “Can I see?” as he unfolds himself from the couch, it feels like she baited him. And it worked. She stretches the neckline on her sweatshirt and tilts her chin toward him, and his fingers trace her collarbone, a careful Y-incision recording her half life. The bruise blooms like a rotting bouquet on her body. _Sorry for your loss._

“Scully.”

“It’ll heal.”

Will heal, has healed. She can’t tell if Mulder is more haunted by the recovery still to come or the one that happened spontaneously while she was passed out on his rug. Is this really all she can give him: another vanished tragedy to clean up after? His sister, her abduction, her cancer—all that blood down their shirts and still no open wound. They could stand before the men who stamp their reports and slice their veins open in tandem and there would be no official record. She hates it (will hate it, has hated it) but it can be intimate too. Dying and having no proof but each other.

But that’s what got her here: wanting to be consumed.

After he found her, after he practically carried her to the couch, Mulder had unbuttoned her blouse, closed his eyes, and spread his fingers over her heart. She’d pictured him painted in oil and haloed in gold, plucking the burning thing from her chest. Her revelation. Neither one of them thought about Padgett, dead in the basement with his heart in his hand, until the sirens wailed onto the block.

Only then, as a bewildered paramedic took her pulse just for something to do, did Scully make Mulder go down to the furnace to see for himself. He returned smiling, a fake comforting smile that almost made her laugh. This was a farce. She thought, for whatever reason, of _Clue_ reruns on cable: _Yep, two corpses. Everything’s fine._ Only she had a pulse. So she gave her statement. She put her foot down at getting an X-ray. She took a shower. And now, with Mulder’s hand heavy on her shoulder, she asks if he might have anything to drink.

To her surprise, he pulls a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet.

“Really?” she frowns. A drink at Mulder’s place is a beer if it’s anything.

“Part of the waterbed haul.” He motions for her to get comfortable on the couch. “My mysterious benefactor left this on the nightstand.”

His mysterious benefactor, she thinks, didn’t know him at all. But he grabs two glasses anyway, cracks ice into each, and carries them to the couch in one hand with dutiful resignation. Mulder won’t leave her to suffer hard liquor alone, and that’s the bitter, tender truth of them. He settles in beside her and pours. They don’t bother to toast.

“Apartment next door is vacant again,” she says after a sharp sip.

“I,” Mulder declares, aiming for dramatic flair but sounding shaken, “am a curse on this building.”

“I’m the curse,” she counters. “He came here for me.”

Mulder’s jaw tightens, and she understands immediately that she fucked up. There are too many pressure points on him. He swirls the ice in his glass, sets it down with a clatter, and stands, drumming his fingers on his jeans. “I should take down that camera,” he says.

“Mulder, no, it’s fine. Not now.”

He pushes the desk chair to the wall, grabs the screwdriver.

“There’s no way you could have known,” she tells him, talking to his back—raising her voice, like that makes a difference. “We both saw the feed. There was no one else there.”

“I’ll just get this done.”

It’s hopeless. She returns to her drink. His ice melts.

Four screws and one disengaged camera later, Mulder drops the whole mess at his feet and sinks into the chair, facing her from across the room. There is a long, knifelike shadow across his face. She could swear the clock stops ticking.

“It wasn’t like you to go in there. To his…” He fumbles to finish the thought, spinning a screw in his fingers. “Den.”

“Well, I did it, so I suppose it was like me,” she sighs. She’s too tired for this. “His _den_?”

“Does lair work for you? Pick your murderer’s word of the day.”

“Padgett certainly would have argued that he wasn’t a murderer.”

“And would you, Scully?” he asks. “Can you absolve a man for thinking a murder into reality?”

“Legally, yes,” she starts. Her cheeks are hot. “There’s no proof of conspiracy to commit. You can’t try a metaphor in a court of law.”

“But morally. I asked about you.”

She knows what he’s asking. He’s asking _Did you like him_.

She flirts with giving him the fight he wants. Lord knows they’ve been building up to a crackling blowout. It would be easy enough for her to prick one of Mulder’s raw nerves and find some righteous ground to stand on, to yell that she doesn’t need his protection. She felt so small and disrespected the first time he barged in to rescue her. The second time—she’d never wanted anyone to save her more. She has no idea where to draw the line. She suspects he doesn’t either. 

She watched Alfred Fellig die in front of her just for taking her hand, and her first thought was of seeing Mulder again. She wished the old man’s death into the darkroom as their fingers wove together. _Can you absolve?_  

“I don’t know.”

She polishes off her drink in one hard swig. The silence between them has gone glassy and hollow, like a ringing in her ears.

Her partner, with his crooked halo, drops his face into his hands.

“Oh, Mulder.” She gets up and crosses the room, kneeling before him. “ _Mulder_.” She wraps her fingers around his knuckles and pulls his hands away. His eyes are wet and bloodshot. He looks right through her.

“Why, Scully?”

“Why what?” His palms are on his knees. Her palms are on his. She knows what he means, but she needs to hear him say it.

“Why him?”

Every one of their fights is about how to care for one another, every last one.

“Because he was next to you.”

 

*** 

The shame wakes her up like it’s knocking the wind out of her again. “I’m sorry,” she whispers into the dark, clutching her shirt. “I’m sorry.”

Beside her, Mulder is awake so quickly she wonders if he was asleep at all. “Scully, what’s wrong?”

“There are bullet holes in your wall.”

This is only sort of the point, but it feels like the entire point at this moment.

“It doesn’t matter.” He brushes a strand of hair from her eyes.

“It does,” she insists. “Mulder, I shot him.”

“I know. I saw the bullet holes.” He leans on his elbow and smiles, like he can charm them both right into being okay. She almost believes him.

Sometimes at night she wonders if the two of them just blinked into existence fully formed like this, which is to say she wonders if they’ll never change. If they’re just here to play these parts. The streetlights whistle through the blinds like film noir and here she is in his bed, on his bed, next to him but not touching, with whiskey on her breath. Tomorrow or yesterday she’ll put on red lips and they’ll work another case they never solve.

Agent Scully is already in love, Agent Scully does nothing about it but still asks Agent Mulder to sleep beside her. Agent Scully keeps going and going and

“Did I die?”

“Scully.” He leans closer. “Never.”

She finally turns on her side to meet his gaze. _That’s what I’m afraid of._

He sighs. His eyes flick to the part of her abdomen that was once his to clean and bandage, a truce begun with a gunshot. “You could have.”

She doesn’t answer.

“I thought you were dead, Scully. You were—I was scared.” And he was. Is. She can tell. But when aren’t they. When aren’t they scared, when aren’t they dying, and how long has she let that stop her. Regrets can’t hold a body.

“I was too.”

She thinks of Fellig, of Bruckman, of what her white whale could be now. She thinks of coming back to life and seeing only Mulder.

She confesses: “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“The man whose hand was in your chest was made up of words and now he’s ash. There’s nothing biological in that. And it doesn’t say anything biological about you.”

Mulder breathes, in and out. He has bullet holes in his wall and she has scar tissue in her abdomen. If every miracle has a cost, an equal and opposite reaction, is it really a miracle? Isn’t it just science?

There is a weight, a weight on her chest.

 

***

She’s been invaded without her consent too much already and she is cavernously empty in places she shouldn’t be, so she looks for equilibrium inside Padgett’s body.

Mulder didn’t understand, when she told him this morning over burnt coffee that she planned to request an autopsy, why it was important. The author was dead with his heart in his hand, and no one else was there. It was simple, in the way that only things without explanations can be. But this simple thing that killed Padgett did not kill her, so Mulder drove her home to change, fiddling with the radio all the way, and now here he is, because this is what he does. He follows her. He sleeps beside her when she asks.

She just has to know.

And here’s the truth: Padgett tore out his own heart with his bare hands. Or at least, his body doesn’t prove that he didn’t, and it doesn’t disprove that he did. Absence of conclusive evidence is, mathematically, a kind of evidence to her now, like losing time and knowing something happened because of the space it leaves. She has only the signs of things and not the things themselves. She and Padgett are alike in that way. She and a girl buried in decomposing flowers are alike in that way.

“Mulder, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she marvels, swinging the light away from the examination table. “There are no striations on the sternum. The costal cartilage is just bent like clay. There are fingerprints in it, and what look to be nail marks on the sternum. Do you want to see?”

He does not. He winces like she’s biting straight down into a lemon, shakes his head hard, and preoccupies himself with a box of gloves in the corner of the morgue.

Padgett tore out his heart when hers would not burn alongside it, and she is finally, incandescently angry that he would expect her to. That he would hold her responsible. He stalked her; her stalker and Mulder were neighbors. Her stalker poisoned attention against her; he made her want from Mulder what Mulder might not be equipped to give and then reminded her that she could die from wanting it.

She knows her partner means distance as a sign of respect. Her Oxford profiler took her at her word the day they met— _you’ve got to trust me_ —and didn’t pry. He asks of her, but he doesn’t ask her—what she wants, what she’s afraid of. She knows, because she knows him, that the child of Bill and Teena Mulder can’t abide polite dinner party small talk. But God, sometimes his trust in what they are stings like winter on the Vineyard. Maybe she envies his ability to experience love as a byproduct, as a detail, and be satisfied with it, but that isn’t her.

For Padgett, who wanted to know her through her actions: What she does is ask questions. What she does is doubt. What she does is almost die, over and over. What she does is take off her cross and put it on again. She memorizes the knots in the wood inside the confessional at St. John’s Church, she lets herself believe heresy in the middle of the night. She knocks on Mulder’s door even though she has a key. She stays: with him, in a basement, in his bed. What she does is dig her nails into her chest. From a college lit class she remembers a lecture on _Richard II_ , on a line about “still-breeding thoughts”: how it meant they were breeding, still, even now, but also sterile, breeding no new life, going nowhere. For so long she’s been standing with her arm outstretched, handing Mulder her bloody heart while it’s still beating. While it’s still.

She’ll burn a prayer candle later, watch one flame light another.

“ _Mulder_ ,” she tries again, sharper this time. And waits.


End file.
